by V. B. Larson
“Laugh it up, Ensign,” said Captain Tumas in his best officer’s rumble. He had no original limbs left except for the one leg they kept jabbing needles into, but he still sounded tough.
When the nursebot had gone, we all looked to Ruth in Pod One for another activity report. She was the only one who could see outside. All the other viewports were shuttered by heavy blast shields of molecular-bonded tritanium alloy, but not hers. Her pod’s viewport had jammed and been left partly open after the battle. Her four-inch slit was our only connection to the outside world. By twisting and straining against our straps, we could all see the sky outside through her window. The sky was blue with a twinge of lavender and usually cloud-free. But only Ruth in Pod One could crane her neck enough to see the ground.
“Looks like another warm morning out there,” she told us, flashing everyone a smile. “I should warn you, the nursebots are out there in force. Looks like they might even chase us down with needles at the picnic tables.”
Captain Tumas grunted.
The figure in Pod Two was a kid. He never spoke, I don’t think his larynx had healed enough yet. But he listened to us closely and rolled his eyes around alertly to whoever was talking. I dreaded when he became Pod One’s occupant, the next up for discharge. He was only a kid with no voice, how was he supposed to keep everyone in the ward apprised of outside events?
“Aren’t there any visitors? There should be visitors,” came a call from way down the line, it was from Pod Seventeen, I think. I didn’t know the guy. It was too hard to have a shouted conversation with someone that far down in a crowded ward. Even further back down the line they relayed Ruth’s comments, I knew. The intercom system was out of course, as all communications had been since the battle, and the ship was running in full-auto mode.
“No visitors,” shouted Ruth down to the guy in Seventeen.
“We are at war, ya know, son,” said Captain Tumas. “Not everything is about our individual comfort.”
“No shit,” said someone from down in the direction of Pod Nine. Tumas’ brows beetled ferociously and he craned his neck to see who it was, but gave up after a while, fuming. Discipline was very hard to keep when you were all strapped into medical pods on full lock-down.
Since the battle, we had been without communications. Not even the nursebots responded to us, perhaps the ship’s whole network was down. The ship had gone into emergency mode and landed us here, somewhere in the Cygnus cluster. At least the klaxons had mercifully stopped after a few hours. We had all thought we were going to go mad with the wailing and flashing.
“Tell us something, Ruth,” I said quietly. Being in Pod Three, there was only the mute boy between us. The kid, I didn’t even know his name, swiveled his eyes from me to Ruth expectantly.
She looked at me and the kid, then gave a slow smile. She turned back to the viewport and gazed outside.
“It’s a warm day. I can see the lake out through the trees. There’s no haze,” she began.
I smiled and closed my eyes. The beeping equipment and the gurgling bodymats that took our waste away in tubes receded. I visualized the world outside. It was an alien world, but it wasn’t without beauty. There were pod-like creatures that looked like mushrooms or perhaps smooth rocks, but which occasionally picked themselves up and moved. There was the tent city, of course, where all the discharged people had set up camp. And there were the picnic tables set up right below the viewport so all our old friends could wave up at us. Well, at Ruth at least.
I opened my eyes as Ruth finished her story. Ten or twenty pods down, I could hear them relaying it to everyone. The whole ward fell silent, as it always did when Ruth described the outside world to us.
The next morning, Ruth was discharged. The nursebot came in and simply began disconnecting her, without preamble. She winced as the tubes and needles and glued-on monitor probes came out and off one at a time. Inside, I was saddened. I looked at the kid. It would be his turn next, I supposed, and we would get no reports from him. Everyone, in a way, had been dreading this day. I felt bad for the kid, because I think he knew we didn’t want him to be at the window.
The chute beneath Ruth opened and she held on for a second, chewing her lip and staring at us. I thought I saw a tear on her face.
“Don’t be sad, soldier! You’re getting out of this hell-hole!” I told her.
She nodded and gave me a smile. Then she was gone down the chute.
It came as a great surprise to me when my Pod came alive and started to move forward, instead of shunting down the line into the kid’s spot. Instead, my pod came out of line, slid sideways past the kid and then backed up and locked into place. I was now Pod One. I looked at the kid. He looked both disappointed, but also relieved. Obviously, the system had judged he was healing too slowly, and I had moved up in priority. Down the line, all the other pods were shifting on their rails, as the diagnostic computers sorted them out.
I turned my head then for my first look outside. Behind me, I could feel everyone’s eager eyes on my back.
“What’s it like?”
“Can you see Ruth out there?”
“Is my Johnny waiting out there for me? He’s tall and blond, at least he was before they shaved it all. He should have come for me by now.”
I stared. Outside there was no forest, no lake, no trees or tent city. There was only a desolate scene of reddish rocks and barren, volcanic-looking sands. Here and there were bubbling pools of a dark viscous substance. Liquid methane, most likely.
There were indeed people out there, nude, frozen, suffocated people in various poses of death. Their corpses showed that none of them had made it more than a dozen yards from the ship’s discharge port. I picked out Ruth’s frosted face. She had managed to make it out far enough to be in my range of vision and to lift a hand to whoever next took her station. Her fingers had twisted into a claw, but I recognized the gesture. It was a salute, such as one comrade might give another.
I wondered numbly how long I would be staring at her before it was my turn to be discharged.
“Well? Come on, tell us something!”
I didn’t look back at them. I knew I would not be able to keep the truth from my face.
After a few quiet moments, which I’m sure they chalked up to being overwhelmed, I began speaking. I recalled all the things Ruth had told us of, and I added in the things my mind had conjured up over the days.
There were a few playful children in my version from the local farming colony. And there were flowers. Flowers with swollen red petals and bright yellow balls of pollen in the center.
Teeth at Bedtime
Inside its soft red mouth the thing had teeth of real enamel.
I didn’t like the look of those teeth. They looked hard and sharp. They gleamed white as though freshly brushed.
“What do you think of it, Will?” Mara asked me. She was looking lovely. It was the day after my birthday and we were alone together in my apartment. Mara herself made a wonderful birthday present. She leaned forward on the couch, her face glowing with expectant happiness. Her whole face smiled, making me feel warm inside. I noticed that a few blonde strands of her hair had caught in her eyelashes and been stained black by her mascara. Even that looked good.
“Well?” she pressed impatiently. “What do you think?”
What can you do when your girlfriend spends a lot of money on something weird? I took the only logical course open to me… I lied.
“It’s…uh. I like it, Mara.” I said, giving her the gladdest smile I could muster. At least I didn’t need to fake being surprised.
My birthday present sat on my bed stand. The thing was a black plastic box with a lot of touch-sensitive buttons and chrome knobs. It was a clock and a radio and self-answering telephone, and it had a slot on top to connect a player.
The only unusual thing about the device was that it had a mouth. No eyes or nose or ears-just the cheeks, the jaws and the mouth. It had a human, wet, female mouth with full red lips and a
bright red tongue. Because it was grinning (it had come out of the box that way) I could see its fine set of hard, white teeth.
I thought of the locked strongbox in my closet and I blinked several times, very quickly.
What sickened me most about the mouth was that I recognized it. I knew those exposed teeth and the curve of that jaw. I knew the dark flat spec of a mole that it had on its right cheek, just above the spot where the lips met. I had kissed that mouth before. It was my girlfriend’s mouth. It was Mara’s mouth.
My mind turned back to the locked metal box that I kept up on the top shelf in my closet, next to the shoe boxes filled with receipts and hardcopies of old tax return forms. I eyed my birthday present and realized that it would never fit in my strongbox. No way.
I fervently hoped that she wouldn’t want me to plug it in before she left. I didn’t know if I had the guts to do it. Mara was looking at me funny. I could tell she was beginning to suspect the truth, that her gift had horrified me. I brightened up reflexively.
“Hey, Hon, this is going to be really great-” I picked the box up, handling it gingerly, the way you would a run-over terrier.
“I’ll just put it in my room.” I pushed my lips into a smile and walked into my bedroom. Mara followed me, making me groan inwardly. I set the obscenity on the bed stand, turning it to face the bed. Then Mara reached past me and plugged it in. I flinched and blinked, as if a foul odor had found my nostrils.
“Power failure detected,” the mouth spoke in a perfect imitation of Mara reading aloud from a dictionary.
“Linking to home system… Link complete.”
It was a high-tech horror. I hated it.
“Isn’t that great, Will?” Mara asked, flashing me with eyes that spoke of smooth thighs and soft kisses. Mara had me on a sex-leash, she charmed me with every movement of her body. I knew it, and hated it, but felt helpless. She was the most attractive girl that I had ever dated. During the last few weeks we had become a steady thing. It was no longer a question of who we were going to see each night, it was just a question of what the two of us would do together. A man could lose his senses over a girl like Mara. To make sure that I never did, I kept my pictures of her in my strongbox, along with pictures of the others I had dated in the past. Just to be sure. I had never told Mara about it, of course, as she wouldn’t have understood.
“It sure is, babe.” Maybe I could sleep on the couch tonight, away from the thing.
“Don’t forget the reunion tomorrow, Will,” Mara reminded me. Nagged me.
My face went hard, like stone, the way it does when I find dog crap stuck to my shoe or when a waitress takes too long with another customer. Fortunately, her back was turned.
“Why don’t you write down the time and the address, so you won’t forget?” Mara suggested. Her voice was soft and innocent, but there was the hard edge of control there, I could hear it. Mara had a beautiful woman’s natural expertise at manipulation. I watched as my traitorous hand picked up a pencil and wrote down the words that she dictated to me. I felt like a secretary. When I had finished, I turned to face her with a pasted-on smile.
Awaiting further instructions. Yes sir. Screw you, sir.
“Now you aren’t going to forget this like you always do, are you Will?” Mara teased me. The yellow number two pencil in my fist snapped. It did it all by itself. It just broke, I swear it. Fortunately, Mara had begun fingering the monstrosity she had given me and didn’t notice the broken pencil or the surprised look on my face. I slipped the snapped pencil into the back pocket of my jeans.
“Let’s play net-music on it for a minute,” she prompted, sitting on the bed and looking at me expectantly. She put her hands into her lap and neatly meshed her fingers. Each nail was carefully painted with a light orange polish. Naturally, we would have to try out the gift she had given me. The only gift she had given me. An expensive gift. Naturally. I felt out of control around Mara, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t understand women. One did not snub your honey’s birthday gift, no matter what one thought of it. Especially, yes especially when that gift was really an image of said girlfriend. You might as well complain about a holo-portrait of her that she had had digitized.
Sure, if you spent half your paycheck on the wrong type of perfume for her you might well find yourself in the exchange line at the mall, with nothing but a frown and a roll of the eyes for a thank-you. But things didn’t work that way when Mara bought a repulsive electronic image of herself and gave it to me. Not for me, they didn’t. Most women were bitches, and Mara was no exception. That’s why I kept the pictures, safe and cool, in my closet with the others. Encased in green metal with a silvery lock of stainless steel.
Approaching the object of my distaste, I knelt before it and lightly ran my finger down the tuning sensor. A liquid amber glow followed my fingerpad as the digital tuning indicator swept across the scale of stations. I watched the mouth buzz its lips together, the white noise of static emanating from it. Each time I passed over a station, the lips twitched and loosed a brief snatch of music or a few words of an announcer. I paused to hear a brief snippet of a newscast concerning the Mexican police-action, which had bogged down only 65 miles north of Mexico City’s outlying slums. A Texas senator begged the congress for justice and two more armor divisions, amid shouts of outrage from the more liberal-minded committee members. I listened for a moment without interest, nothing had changed for weeks and my birth date had already been passed by for the year by the New Plan draft board. I slid my finger more quickly, rippling through the signals, finally leaving it on the hits-only station.
I thumbed the volume control and the room filled with digital-stereo sound. A popular tune called Forget the Alamo from the latest album of the Tazers erupted out of the device. The instrumentals and backup vocals came from the secondary speakers in the thing’s base while Mara’s lovely simulacrum mouth sung the lead.
“What sound!” exclaimed Mara.
I watched Mara’s, or rather the thing’s, mouth form the words and sing with human tonal quality. My stomach curdled like month-old milk. Every move of the mouth and twitch of the cheeks were exacting copies of Mara’s mannerisms and physical traits. Unbidden, my head was punctured by the thought of Mara’s disembodied head being crammed in that box and forced to sing by computer-controlled electronic pulses jolting down her nerves to the muscles in her cheeks, jaw and tongue. I didn’t even like the Tazers.
But apparently the sight and sound of the whole thing had gotten to Mara in a different way. I felt her soft arms clasp around my neck as she leaned forward and began to lightly kiss my neck. The artificial, fruity smell of her shampoo filled my sinuses. Her hot breath blew over my left ear. I looked down over her shoulder and eyed the smooth swell of her rear in those tight, exquisitely faded jeans. But for once I wasn’t in the mood.
“Mara, babe, let’s not start anything now. You’ve got to go to class tonight,” I could hardly believe my ears, but I just couldn’t start making out in front of that thing.
Mara, if anything, was more surprised than I. “Yeah,” she said with a small, shocked and nonplussed sniff. She sat back, straightened her clothing and arched her fine brown eyebrows at me. “Right-school. Sure.”
I felt guilty immediately, but relieved. I didn’t want that thing… watching us. I stood up and so did she. She eyed me strangely, as if I had grown a beard overnight or taken on some other odd characteristic. She glanced briefly at her watch and then straightened the sleeves on her white polyester-and-cotton blend blouse. Mara was unused to rejection in any form. For just a moment, a feeling of exhilaration passed over me as I realized I had denied her something. Then it was gone and, hating myself, I moved to kiss up to her, slipping my arms around her.
She softened immediately. It felt nice. “I do need to go to class,” she said in a quiet voice. Her eyes met mine, then dropped. I kissed her.
Mara’s duplicate mouth spat a split-second of static.
I glanced at it, my up
per lip curling by itself. I decided not to let the monster ruin my date with Mara. I turned away from the thing and kissed Mara again. My girl melted in my arms. A rush of red heat passed over my forehead, making my skin burn.
“Happy birthday,” Mara whispered. Again the atrocity on my bed stand buzzed its lips. It sounded as if a lightning flash had interrupted the signal. I wondered if an electrical storm had started outside. I paused for a moment, but there was no thunder.
The Tazers began thumping and twanging again in earnest. I shrugged. Mara pulled me closer. I quickly lost interest in all else. Mara missed her class.
I awoke after midnight with a start. Mara had long since gone home to her parents’ apartment. There was a phone ringing, but I didn’t have a phone in my bedroom. Confused with sleep, I groped blindly for the lamp switch. Then, for the first time I touched it. My fingers pressed into its pseudo-skin. The flesh felt soft and smooth, just the way a young girl’s cheek should feel. My middle finger found the moving lips. I was grabbing a stranger’s face in the dark.
I gave a yell and rolled out of bed on the opposite side, thumping into the bedroom wall with my shoulder. I snapped on the light and there it was, on its sixth ring, mouth opening to expose those hard wet teeth that glistened between its red lips. As the ring died away, the lips relaxed, slipping down to cover the white teeth again. Shaking a bit and blinking the sleep from my dehydrated, sluggish eyes, I pressed the button to answer the call.
“Hello?” I asked tentatively.
“Hello,” replied a soft, sultry voice. I smiled and relaxed a notch or two. It was Mara. Then I stiffened again. Was it really Mara, or did the thing just use Mara’s voice for phone calls? No, that didn’t sound right, Koreans wouldn’t think like that. I rubbed my face and smoothed back my tousled hair. The rush of adrenalin was fading. I sank back down to sit on the bed.
“Hi Mara. What’s up?” I asked, feeling that strange ache you get when your mouth wants to yawn but you are trying to hold it back. I glanced at the digital clock on the thing’s front panel. It was 1:17 a.m.